The 2021 Major season: Winners and Losers
By Bill Felber
Bryson DeChambeau
For all the focus both on DeChambeau’s daunting physical skills and his obsessive personality, when you boil it all down to raw numbers his 2021 season was virtually meaningless.
DeChambeau was never at any time a factor in any of the season’s four Majors, finishing outside the top 25 in all four. Given his victory at the 2020 U.S. Open, you would never have guessed that outcome…but it happened.
As a consequence, there was little meaningful movement in either his peak or career scores. To DeChambeau’s statistical reputation, it was as if 2021 did not happen.
Beginning the 2021 season with a peak rating of -0.39 – that’s outside the top 150, DeChambeau needed to improve to -1.00 to reach that rank. His four indifferent performances only lifted him to -0.51, so he concludes 2021 still “off the board” for peak performance.
DeChambeau opened 2021 with a career score of +13.56, ranking 134th among the greatest players for career excellence. He finished the year at +13.99, having moved not a single position up or down the list.
That is a very bad sign. Twenty-seven year olds with mad physical gifts aren’t supposed to spend the prime of their professional careers going nowhere. That’s what DeChambeau did in 2021.
He may be great some day. For the moment, however, he is the contemporary equivalent of Jay Hebert, Tom Lehman and Kel Nagle. They, too, had one Major title and games that came and went, often on short notice.